Between the Covers: Scholars on the Sidewalk

28 Aug Between the Covers: Scholars on the Sidewalk

Philip Kaufman

We love assembling a bunch of smartypants for a sidewalk event – especially around a wonderful celebration like Telluride Film Festival‘s 40th anniversary. This weekend, specifically Sunday, September 1,1:15 p.m., we’ll have the literary celebritati in town for the Big Event at our shop, Between the Covers, for a quadruple signing session and those unforgettable one-on-ones. We suggest you enjoy an espresso milkshake from the coffee bar while taking in what these professorial pundits have to say about their particular aspect on film.

Or maybe just see who’s “hiding” on the cozy deck in back …

Annette Insdorf

ANNETTE INSDORF. 
Not only is Insdorf in Telluride with her book about writer-director Philip Kaufman, she is in town with Kaufman himself! Insdorf’s study of Kaufman’s cinema was published by the “Contemporary Film Directors” series in March 2012. It  is the first book about the director of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Right Stuff.” Another of her books, “Indelible Shadows: Film and Holocaust,” is considered a landmark study on the subject. The revised edition includes a preface by Elie Wiesel.

Insdorf is a Professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, as well as Director of Undergraduate Film Studies. She co-hosted Cannes Film Festival coverage for BRAVO/IFC with Roger Ebert and was a jury member at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival. This diminutive doyenne knows her stuff, a fact seamlessly displayed year after year when she works as a moderator and translator for TFF panels and panelists. And, as always, dressed to the nines …

B. RUBY RICH. B. Ruby Rich is Professor in the Film & Digital Media Department, as well as Director of the Social Documentation. M.A. Program. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching documentary and film studies. She is the author of “New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut” and “Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement.”

B Ruby Rich

Rich serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the British Film Institute Film Classics series and the Advisory Board for the St. Andrews Film Studies book series. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Village Voice, New York Times, Elle, Mirabella, and other publications. On television, she won an Emmy for her work as a correspondent on Independent View, produced by KQED and aired internationally.

Rich has long been active as juror or curator for film festivals all over the planet.

JEFFREY RUOFF
. Ruoff is a film historian and documentary filmmaker in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. Ruoff has a new book out for which he was the editor: “Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals.” The first scholarly anthology to look at the crucial role played by programming in film festivals should be a neat read for any filmophile. B. Ruby Rich wrote the following about Ruoff’s unique offering:

Jeffrey Ruof

“Combining theoretical and historical overviews with detailed studies of individual festivals and personal testimonies from experts long associated with film festivals, the book makes a thorough, wide-ranging and insightful effort at covering a field that has been significantly neglected in scholarship … [Ruoff] has tracked down film festival insiders as well as key researchers in the emergent field of film-festival studies. The combination makes for a valuable synergistic anthology that lays bare the inner workings of a world too often trivialized or deified by those who don’t realize what transpires ‘behind the curtain.’ This important collection raises the bar on festival writing, interrogates questions of taste and marketing, and offers a model for the next stage of study.”

Explaining the matrix of programming has officially been tackled!

So there you have it – and from the unique perspective of the pen at that. See you on the sidewalk.

And keep reading everyone …